I'll be very interested to see the definition of "ultra-processed" in this legislation. I couldn't find one at a first glance - it seems to mandate that someone defines it, but doesn't contain a definition itself from what I could see.
Edit: Found it. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml... (thanks to @crummy for the correction). Seems like a reasonable start. Amusing to see that alcoholic drinks are specifically not considered ultra-processed foods for the purposes of school meals!
> In July 2025, the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that 32.7 percent of children and youth between 12 and 19 years old are prediabetic.
>> In July 2025, the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that 32.7 percent of children and youth between 12 and 19 years old are prediabetic.
> Wow.
Sadly, I'm not too surprised. My state also has free breakfast and lunch in public schools and it is possible for them to get served over 100g of added sugar between the two meals and classroom provided snacks. Then add to it whatever the kids are eating at home.
It also creates added difficulty for kids to concentrate on lessons when their blood sugar is spiking and crashing repeatedly throughout the day.
> 104661. (a) (1) For purposes of this article, except as provided in subdivision (b), “ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” means any food or beverage that contains a substance described in paragraph (2) and either high amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as described in subparagraph (A) of paragraph (3), or a nonnutritive sweetener or other substance described in subparagraph (B) of paragraph (3).
> (3) (A) High amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as defined respectively as follows:
> (i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat
I feel like the saturated fat limit would be the most impactful restrictions.
However right after it's entirely opened up again:
> (b) “Ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” does not include any of the following:
> (1) Commodity food specifically made available by the United States Department of Agriculture.
> (2) A raw agricultural commodity as defined in Section 110020.
> (3) An unprocessed locally grown or locally raised agricultural product as defined in paragraph
> (3) Not more than 35 percent of its total weight shall be composed of sugar, including naturally occurring and added sugar. This paragraph shall not apply to fruits, vegetables that have not been deep fried, or a dried fruit and nut and seed combination.
wonder who'll be the first to argue that HFCS isn't sugar.
“ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” means (any food or beverage that contains a substance described in paragraph (2) and either high amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as described in subparagraph (A) of paragraph (3), or a nonnutritive sweetener or other substance described in subparagraph (B) of paragraph (3)).
or
“ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” means (any food or beverage that contains a substance described in paragraph (2) and either high amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as described in subparagraph (A) of paragraph (3)), or a nonnutritive sweetener or other substance described in subparagraph (B) of paragraph (3).
or
“ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” means (any food or beverage that contains a substance described in paragraph (2)) and either high amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as described in subparagraph (A) of paragraph (3), or a nonnutritive sweetener or other substance described in subparagraph (B) of paragraph (3).
I don’t think kids should be having boutique, hand-crafted “bean to bar” chocolate in their school lunches, but I also don’t think most Californians have products like that in mind when they think of “Ultra-Processed Foods”.
Also as quoted elsewhere: Deep frying is ultra-processing?
Yeah the whole "ultra processed food" angle is meaningless. Just call it junk food.
If the thing that is bad for us is the processing and preservatives then we can pursue that... but if you want to count things like potato chips then we need to be honest about what the label actually means. The UPF label adds a veneer of scientific precision that isn't actually present in any guidelines surrounding it.
Pretty sure it is NOT the definition of that law, but my own definition is: You make a meal only of basic ingredients. A basic ingredient is something that does not have an ingredient list on its packaging. I.e. Fruit, vegetables, eggs, meat and fish does not come with an ingredient list. There are some exceptions like dairy products (butter, yoghurt, cheese) which are okay to use.
> basic ingredient is something that does not have an ingredient list on its packaging
These are unprocessed foods [1].
From them you get processed culinary ingredients, like olive oil, vinegar, honey and butter. As long as you’re minimally vigilant with these, you should be fine, though some production methods may still add preservatives or use solvents in their manufacture.
After that one has processed foods, which may still have a good amount of Group 1 and 2 ingredients, before we get to Group 4, UPFs, what California is banning in school lunches.
Sounds like you're defining processed food, whereas this is about ultra processed food.
For me, processed food might include something like unsweetened peanut butter where while the only ingredient is peanuts, it's still been through a process of grinding so that it's no longer in its natural form.
At the other end of the spectrum an example of ultra processed food would be a factory packaged item with a long list of ingredients which includes ones you don't recognise e.g. chemical names or E numbers.
- Unprocessed or minimally processed foods (fresh or frozen products, yoghurts, etc)
- Processed culinary ingredients (oil, vinegar)
- Processed foods (foods created from combining elements of the first 2 groups using typical cooking processes, like bread, pasta, some meats, canned vegetables)
I imagine it’s got more to do with ingredients than processing. Local restaurants might make fresh bread with a bleached flour product that has various dough conditioning agents added to it, while puffed rice absolutely requires an industrial process to create and has one ingredient.
> puffed rice absolutely requires an industrial process
“Traditional methods to puff or pop rice include frying in oil or salt. Commercial puffed rice is usually made by heating rice kernels under high pressure in the presence of steam, though the method of manufacture varies widely” [1].
If I had to guess, the commercial stuff is more thoroughly and homogeneously gelatinized. That, in turn, probably raises its glycemic index.
Guacamole would count as Group 3 I believe. You use Group 1 and Group 2 ingredients to create it unless you're just grinding up avocados, in which case that's not a guacamole. If you really want to get interesting, you could even say homemade guacamole uses citric acid (from limes) to extend shelf life and enhance the flavor, which is on top of the sodium chloride (salt) that you use to do the same.
> What's the minimally processed food that bread is made of?
Flour is minimally processed, Nova Group 1, if it’s simply milled and separated. If it’s prepared with industrial solvents, or bleached, it goes straight to Group 4.
Nova doesn’t distinguish between ingredients and food [1]. (It needs to be able to do this. UPFs are defined, in part, by almost lacking low-Nova inputs.)
Bread is a bit of an exception here, as it undergoes extensive mechanical (milling), biochemical (fermentation) and thermal (baking) processing. Yet it does not count as ultra-processed.
Bread is made from dough, which is mainly made from flour (the "minimally processed" food), which is made from grains (the unprocessed food)
It definitely stood out as a bit of a confounding example. That combined with the emotive language used in the classification names makes me a bit wary of this way of classifying food.
AFAIK, whole-wheat flour is considered minimally processed. Of course bread is not equal, so it was more about home-made/sourdough types, not high-processed, shelf-stable ones.
> Biscuits and crisps are generally considered to be ultra processed foods, despite containing only basic ingredients
Depends on if they’re ultra processed or not.
If they won’t stale for weeks, they’re ultra processed with preservatives and/or solvents. If they go stale and have a simple ingredients list, they probably aren’t.
(And kids don’t need to be habituated to having either with every lunch.)
Man, you're missing a bunch of ingredients to actually make tasty cookies. Definitely need some salt. She's probably also using vanilla extract or purchased chocolate chips (or chunks) or cinnamon. Plus the leavening agent, so baking powder (or baking soda and another acid). That's all just for the basic cookies, there's so many options out there using stuff like malted chocolate powder, and that's ignoring making palatable gluten-free cookies.
This whole terminology just brings about brain damaged discourse as seen in this same thread. Just you wait for someone to say "itS jUsT LiKE caLLiNg wAtER dIHydrOgEN mONoXide".
I much prefer the following:
1. Food providers basically do all this crap to reduce costs. That's it that's the incentive. For _various_ reasons, a good, local food supply chain has become expensive. If we go debugging the causes of that we will find that the solution is outside the purview of a nutrition department. Let's not do that.
2. Instead, we try to limit menus that tend towards being cheap (like school food in this context) to contain dishes that are cheap by default. Food that's cheap by default, pre-cost-optimisation, is most often simple food. Small number of ingredients, very simple cooking process, minimal frying, etc,. Simple enough that they can just make it right there from start to finish, or somewhere nearby, for low cost, with minimal supply volatility.
Using my hollywood-inspired knowledge of the american school menu, but practical experience with handling food at schools in India, I'd suggest s/cereal/oats+fruits, s/mac-n-cheese/simpler pasta dish-say pesto or shredded chicken pasta, s/choco milk/just milk, s/chicken nuggets/pulled chicken sandwich with simple veggies. Can add some stew/soup in there as well. Beans too if needed. All with simple spice combinations.
These can be easily made fresh on-site or at a satellite kitchen serving 10-15 schools. Beyond 30-40 is when even this gets dicey.
Eggs I suppose schools won't be (probably aren't right now) allowed to break it and cook it on-site due to salmonella risk, which is why they all use pasteurised pre-made crap. So I've omitted it. It's also weird for lunch, I assume. I've left out cheese too due to the tendency for folks to shift to imitation cheese, as it's most common cheese even in usual grocery shops. Oil is also minimal - you basically are only using a drizzle of it for trapping flavour above. No frying is done. Bread is pretty much the only processed product left there, you can probably mandate whole wheat % for those, but still, overall it will be a big improvement.
Instead of playing a cat and mouse game where you make regulations, and you get back the same effect just through a route skirting those regulations, a practical solution similar to the one above, which removes the incentives to skirt, might be in order.
That said, I don't think school food has much to do with child obesity crises. What they eat outside school far outweighs school food in quantity. It's an easy political win though since it's the only part of kids diet that govt controls, which is why they harp on about it.
> Stabilizers and thickeners, as defined in Section 170.3(o)(28) of Title 21 of the Code of Federal Regulations.
...
> “Stabilizers and thickeners: Substances used to produce viscous solutions or dispersions, to impart body, improve consistency, or stabilize emulsions, including suspending and bodying agents, setting agents, jellying agents, and bulking agents, etc.”
So ... flour? Actually healthier things with scarier names like xanthan gum?
For various reasons, I believe the CFR defines flour as a food, not a food additive, but it may have additives that qualify. (I can't find any text that explicitly states that foods are not food additives, but either way, no form of wheat flour is listed in the Substances Added to Food database.)
Common culprits include chemicals added during the bleaching process and addition of "enzyme" / other ingredients that help improve baking consistency. Some examples:
> Actually healthier things with scarier names like xanthan gum?
This would almost certainly fall afoul of these rules. And with good reason. Xantham gum is fine per se, but it tends to help unhealthy food stay together. I don’t see why a school kitchen needs to serve anything thickened with it.
Xantham gum is used quite often for gluten-free foods. It can really help make a usable gluten-free loaf of bread and sauces as well. It's purchaseable at plenty of grocery stores and is sometimes included in flours, it's been a boon for those living gluten free.
I was more commenting on the uses of xanthum gum to be helpful, but reading through the Nova classifications... They seem problematic in the exact way you're describing here and are at best a proxy for nutrition that can be manipulated, using words like "simple food products" and "rare culinary use" is ripe for interpretation.
The bill itself calls out using USDA databases for various ingredients and various sections of federal regulations, so I can't comment too much about how they'd feel about xanthum gum without diving deep. Not to go off on a tangent, but just from the bill's text, I can say for sure they don't like nonnutritive sweeteners, which I think really hurts diabetics choices at reducing their reliance on insulin while still enjoying nice treats. Although not too important for a school meal, it's definitely part of the ultra processed conversation and why it's not a simple thing to categorize food into groups.
> The bill itself calls out using USDA databases for various ingredients and various sections of federal regulations, so I can't comment too much about how they'd feel about xanthum gum without diving deep.
For reference: xanthan gum specifically would fall afoul of the rules, as... a (ii) stabilizer or thickener, (iv) coloring or coloring adjunct, and (v) emulsifier.
Depending on the consistency you're going for, many are way better with it than other thickers. It's natural, and has a much lower impact on your blood glucose than flour. It's good stuff. Everyone should have it in their kitchen.
So is the same item counted as UPF when the USDA supplies it but not otherwise, or does it mean the USDA supplying it grant the category of item non-UFP status.
Does this count if they supply it from a vending machine on their premises :-)
Oh, ok, that doesn't mean at all what I thought it meant, sorry! (British, I just assumed 'commodity food supplied by agriculture' would be all cereals etc., possibly nationally grown only, but you know, commodities.)
Seems like a typical blanket baseless unscientific attack of everything deemed "unnatural". Lots of the typical insane stuff, sugar is okay, but "Nonnutritive sweeteners" are not. Spices are okay, but MSG is not. Just a laundrylist of the typical alternative medicine mumbo jumbo. Kind of pathetic, but not unexpected from the state legislature
I'm sure they extensively deliberated the health effect of Luo Han Fruit Concentrate and Maltitol
I think it points to a failure of the scientific community to identify better criteria.
There is plenty of data showing diet has a big impact on health and other outcomes, yet far less data on specifics.
Since science doesn't give specific things to ban, legislation is pretty much headed towards "let's have everyone eat what they eat in the south of France where people are really healthy".
> Since science doesn't give specific things to ban, legislation is pretty much headed towards "let's have everyone eat what they eat in the south of France where people are really healthy”
Exactly. Science can’t give us actionable information, so appeal to established practice it is.
I think the scientific community has done just fine. When these individual substances are tested they're by and large not found to have negative health effects. Then the loonies just refuse to believe it and thing the chemicals are making their kids gay.
The problem isn't the MSG. It's providing a well balanced diet. We have a relatively clear idea of what constitutes "well balanced". You can quibble about the specifics but this bill is fundamentally off on a crazy unscientific tangents.
There are just three lines that actually address nutrition:
(i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat.
(ii) The food or beverage contains a ratio of milligrams of sodium to calories that is equal to or greater than 1:1.
(iii) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from added sugars.
Instead of paragraphs of banning the "scary chemicals", why not work on making sure kids get the vitamins, vegetables and fiber they need in each meal. I'm not a nutritionist, but there are some basics that are braindead simple that don't involve banning Sucralose.
I went on a trip to South Korea recently. There are very few overweight people there. But the food that people eat doesn't seem healthy at all.
- every meal is served with white rice ("empty calories")
- every meal is served with Kimchi (high sodium)
- most dishes are flavored with soy sauce, gochutan, rice syrup... they are extremely high in sodium + msg
- people love fried chicken with syrupy sauces
- korean barbeque is popular, with very fatty cuts (pork belly etc.)
Pretty much all of those foods would be considered unhealthy, but somehow Koreans don't seem to suffer from obesity like US + Europe do, I have no idea why.
It’s actually pretty simple. Despite what you’re calling unhealthy foods (I’d argue kimchi has health benefits from the fermentation), they have a lower overall caloric intake and societal pressure to conform to a thin appearance. If you want to be skinny eat less calories. If you want to be healthy, eat highly nutritious foods and the right amount of calories for your lifestyle.
I don't think a large proportion of thin people are thin because of societal pressure. And conversely I don't think societal pressure makes many people thin, because I hear so much complaints about body shaming and unrealistic beauty expectations and discrimination against obesity etc, so it clearly isn't working any miracles.
I think most people who are thin just have a food intake regulation that is pretty well balanced so they don't over eat because they don't feel that hungry when they have had enough calories.
The reason why some groups of people have been increasingly prone to obesity is external factors interfering with that regulation. It's probably lots of things, food availability, ingredients, cost, culture, other mental health issues, medications, entertainment, work, availability of cars. One thing it is not is simple.
The calories in vs calories out mechanic is simple, the reasons why that's going out of kilter is not.
I am not sure there is a strong societal pressure to be thin. Last several years, sure. But older generations, nor so much (see deities in any buddist temple). And there was enough time after food became abundant for the older generations health to tank if that diet was very bad for them. My 2c.
I am not sure there is a strong societal pressure to be thin. Last several years, probably. But older generations, nor so much (see deities in any buddist temple). And there was enough time after food became abundant for the older generations health to tank if that diet was very bad for them. My 2c.
A few things come to mind. First, South Korea has low obesity on the global scale (BMI >= 30 kg/m2) but within the country [1] they use an "Asia-Pacific" scale for the definition which starts at BMI of 25. [2] So, from the Korean perspective, they have substantial obesity.
Second, I do not know whether there are some Korean diets that are more correlated with obesity. In Thailand, people eat much the same, and they are more often obese on the global scale. Less kimchi, though, and probably more coconut milk and sugar.
Simple diet composition is probably not the main factor in obesity. I do notice that "normal" portion sizes are pretty small in Korea, based on what I see in their media. Even feasts are shown to have reasonable portion sizes. In the US, portion sizes tend to maximally fill the stomach, and have grown considerably over the years.
Highly processed foods are generally designed to add addictive properties and cause overconsumption. I am not sure that's the goal of the Korean dishes you have tried. If we understand what the new weight loss drugs are telling us, we can see that increasing satiety faster with fewer calories should be the goal of our foods. (no citation, just my interpretation of what's going on).
Koreans intensely shame each other about gaining weight, which helps people control calories in and calories out. East asians eat very little food. Tik Tok is full of videos of Chinese making fun of Japanese for their “sad, tiny lunches.”
I have read somewhere (on HN?) a hypothesis that such traditional diets pretty quickly wipe out genetic lines predisposed to diabetes, etc. And that the effect is not diet, it is genetics+diet.
The quantities of those ingredients are what matters most.
Every meal must contain more empty calories than everything else combined, but not in an excessive amount.
I do not know about Korea, but I have been in Japan, where also every meal is served with excellent white rice. However, there was never too much of it and in general the quantities of all ingredients were right for a balanced diet, much more so than I have seen in most other countries.
> (i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat.
Interestingly, dairy products like butter are explicitly allowed, despite the fact that 50%+ of its fats are saturated
> I'm not a nutritionist, but there are some basics that are braindead simple that don't involve banning Sucralose.
I'm in favor of banning artificial sweeteners. Just look at why they are used in animal farming to see why it is a bad idea to randomly add them to human food.
If someone is habitually consuming sugar sweetened beverages, replacing those with ASBs will, the evidence strongly suggests, reduce your risk of obesity and various chronic diseases.
We can say "just don't consume either" but we have decades of attempting such policies that shows people don't work that way.
Someone who wants to drink a can of coke will drink a can of coke, why would we ban the healthier option?
The evidence actually suggests that soft drink consumption is equally associated with higher all-cause mortality and artificially sweetened is every bit as bad as sugar sweetened. Even when controlling for smoking status, BMI, physical activity, and alcohol consumption.
It was suggested elsewhere that the primary mechanism for soft drink associated mortality is acidic fluids causing tooth decay, which in turn causes cardiovascular disease. (Bacteria entering the bloodstream through inflamed oral mucosa, and forming plaques along arterial walls.)
And the evidence for artificial sweetener benefits on population level is practically non-existent. In fact animal farming points to a detrimental effect.
You have to be very specific in the intervention you’re either looking at in an RCT or modelling in a prospective cohort study. We wouldn’t expect adding NNSs to a diet to improve much (perhaps some benefit from carbonated ones on body mass). We need to investigate/model replacement of SSBs with NNSs.
When we do that we pretty consistently see benefits. Good overview as a response to the WHO position paper here that goes over that evidence base: https://mailchi.mp/b30c80ddf8ba/who-as
Yes, replacement can work to adjust weight trends in a controlled setting.
But all empirical observations so far show that artificial sweeteners in people's diets do not have the desired effect when people's food and beverage intake is uncontrolled.
In fact results from animal studies are that you can even substitute part of the feed with just the artificial sweetener to achieve the same body mass gain. And this is known since 1960s with Cyclamate and rats: https://doi.org/10.1038/221091b0
More studies in the meantime varied a bit on the size of the effect, and some were inconclusive, but generally the results held up.
So no, artificial sweeteners do not help to manage weight. What the studies actually show is that controlling people's intake does.
Let me get this straight: your epistemic framework is such that when presented with RCTs in humans showing positive effects, observational studies in humans showing null findings (likely because of poor adjustment models) and negative associations in rats, we should conclude “artificially sweetened is every bit as bad as sugar sweetened”?
No. What I say is if we introduce a public health policy, then we need to take human behavior and adherence rates into account.
Example: Abstinence is 100% effective against STDs and teenage pregnancy in any controlled setting. That does not make it a good public health policy to tell teenagers to abstain from having sex. In fact despite condoms having lower efficacy than abstinence, teaching people the proper use of condoms is overall more effective.
If we want to solve obesity then randomly adding/substituting artificial sweeteners to human food will not work. Instead we need to reduce access to hyperpalatable foods, which can be done through economic means (e.g. taxes).
No, it's about processing. The food industry has demonstrated that it doesn't give a crap about producing healthy food if that impacts the bottom line, so they pull every trick they can to increase profits whilst hiding the changes from consumers' ability to detect them.
Not unsurprisingly, most of those changes use fancy processes and ingredients to mimick other ingredients and processes.
Legislation like this is saying "enough, you can only use the following set of processes". If that results in some hypothetical healthy food being banned, so be it, but really this is about a loss of trust.
> The food industry has demonstrated that it doesn't give a crap about producing healthy food if that impacts the bottom line, so they pull every trick they can to increase profits whilst hiding the changes from consumers' ability to detect them
Ok? What’s that got to do with which forms of processing are unhealthy? This whole statement doesn’t really add anything.
> Not unsurprisingly, most of those changes use fancy processes and ingredients to mimick other ingredients and processes.
So it’s the “fancy” part you don’t like? What does fancy mean? You can quantify it, I’m sure?
> Legislation like this is saying "enough, you can only use the following set of processes".
Right, and as GP pointed out, the following set doesn’t seem to be particularly healthy.
Processing is defined in the legislation. By and large it's ingredients most people use and recognise in their own kitchens. Fancy means something that doesn't fulfill that definition.
The point of anti UPF sentiment isn't to be healthy per se, but to remove the disconnect between food as most people understand it and we evolved to handle and what is typically produced in industrial kitchens.
The idea that we can process our way to a healthy diet has not stood up to the real world experimentation. Maybe it's time to stop experimenting on school children and just accept that perhaps they should be fed food that is generally recognised as such down to its base ingredients.
Outside of causing an imbalance (which would require a LOT of salt), there’s nothing bad about a lot of salt. People have been eating tons of salt for centuries.
> refined flower
Not sure what definition you’re using here so this might not be ideal, but probably fine. People have been milling for centuries.
> soya lecithins
Made in a lab about 100 years ago, and its primary use is to increase profits via long shelf life (increasing shelf life could be a noble goal, ie freezers are great). We have billionaires flying private jets around. Redo some resource allocation and we don’t need soya lecithins.
Much modernity has 0 respect for Chestetons fence. On top of that, nutrition science is basically a social science in terms of accuracy (not a dig, it’s very hard). Many “advances” today are purely profit motivated and don’t pay enough respect to the people’s wellbeing. We should be skeptical of changes done to make the rich richer.
What’s your goalpost for evidence here, I.e. what would it take to convince you that salt consumption above the levels indicated in dietary guidelines is harmful?
If someone is habitually consuming sugar sweetened beverages, replacing those with ASBs will, the evidence strongly suggests, reduce your risk of obesity and various chronic diseases. We can say "just don't consume either" but we have decades of attempting such policies that shows people don't work that way.
Someone who wants to drink a can of coke will drink a can of coke, why would we ban the healthier option?
Worse is that artificial sweeteners increase feed conversion efficiency (an effect which has been known since 1960s experiments with rats and Cyclamate), and are for this reason frequently added to animal feed.
For humans however this effect is undesirable, as it exacerbates the problem which they are supposed to solve.
This seems like a fancy way of saying “it’s a cheap approach to make animal feed taste better, so the animals eat more and thus gain more weight/produce more milk/etc”.
What impact would pouring a bunch of refined sugar on animal feed have on feed conversion efficiency?
What do studies on humans say on the actual real-life effects of people using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar?
If you permit me to be a bit glib, if we outlawed everything that people think tastes good, almost no one would overeat, and we would have solved obesity. Without going to that extreme, surely there are other interventions that can help limit the problem of overeating, and isn’t there evidence that artificial sweeteners are actually helpful in doing that? Remember that the starting point for humans isn’t hay and the slop we feed to pigs, it’s ice cream and McDonald’s.
> “it’s a cheap approach to make animal feed taste better, so the animals eat more and thus gain more weight/produce more milk/etc”.
No, not at all.
Feed conversion efficiency is the body weight gained per unit of feed consumed. If you add artificial sweeteners to animal feed, they will gain more weight when consuming the same feed, or gain the same weight when consuming less feed. This leads to cost savings for the farmer.
This observation may be a bit surprising as artificial sweeteners have 0 calories. But then again, antibiotics and growth hormones have the same effect.
> What do studies on humans say on the actual real-life effects of people using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar?
It is unscientific nonsense given there is no proven causal link between "pRoCeSsEd FoOdS" whatever they might be and longterm adverse health.
The countries that consume the most processed foods are also the longest lived, obviously such a correlation does not imply processed foods lead to longevity, just that any accusation of cause and effect is more easily explained by abundance and affluenza (sic).
How long before the UPF cult proclaims vaccines are poison, I note than some of their number already do.
One thing that is not in doubt is that many UPFs are hyper-palatable. It’s much harder to overeat if the food in question is potatoes, carrots, and fish than if the meal is Pringles, Ice cream, and deep fried fish sticks.
But what if it is lays potato chips? Potatoes fried in oil and then salted. None of the potato scrap mashing and molding that pringles have.
There is a connection between ultra processing and hyper-palatability, but it is a very lossy one. Doritos are ultra processed but no honest definition of ultra processed foods can include Fritos. Are Doritos substantially worse for you than Fritos?
Is ice cream ultra processed? There are definitely ultra processed ice creams you can buy, with lots of stabilizers or whatever. But you can also make ice cream with just cream, milk, sugar, and vanilla beans. If anything, the homemade stuff that isn't ultra processed is even more hyper-palatable than the "frozen dairy dessert" kind.
$HERE the anti-processed proponents seem to be mostly pro-butter folks. Getting premature deaths down in the eighties and nineties caused by saturated "natural" fats took a lot of effort and these useful idiots are undoing much of that work.
I think the reference was maybe about the butter vs. margarine controversy? That margarine was lauded as more healthy, but turned out to be actually less healthy than butter, due to hydrogenation producing trans fats which elevated cardiovascular risk.
Since mid-1990s, margarine no longer contains appreciable amounts of trans fats.
Butter also contains trans fats but these are ruminant TFAs which I understand are not so bad.
This is why despite butter composition being worse "on paper" there is no empirical observation that it is less healthy than plant margarine.
I always thought it was a travesty that the "chefs" at my schools were just heating up junk food. It's the perfect place to achieve the economies of scale to produce whole-foods-based meals. But yet no 'real' food - dishes made from raw meat and raw vegetables that are processed in-house - was ever produced. I honestly don't think this will change in my lifetime. It's too much work and it feels like working hard, especially in a government position, is seen as making you a chump in our culture today.
I work at Google. We have cafeterias with real food. There are videos on youtube fawning over how cafeteria staff are able to tackle this logistical challenge of serving high quality food to so many people each day. "Wow you have such amazing food there" is a selling point. People take their friends to have a meal at work to show off.
This responsibility is roughly identical to the responsibility that cafeteria staff have. Feeding meals to hundreds of kids is not any different from feeding meals to hundreds of adults. Yet cafeteria staff are, like you say, treated as garbage and uncreative jobs. So of course nobody who is passionate about food production decides to work in a school cafeteria.
Money solves this (plus society giving a shit about the flourishing of children). That's the long and short of the story. Decide that school lunch is not just about meeting minimum nutritional standards and make it about the joy of serving and eating food. Vastly increase pay for cafeteria staff, increase their autonomy to produce meals, and increase their budget for ingredients.
Everything else is putting lipstick on a pig. Further constraints on acceptable ingredients or macro and micro nutritional breakdowns will just force the cost optimization to some other unwanted state.
Instead of blaming the low nutritional value of school lunches on line workers being unwilling to "work hard" because of "modern culture," consider the possibility that they aren't the ones responsible for setting the menus or budgeting the ingredients.
Your actual gripe is with local governments, the USDA and voters who consider funding any social program to be communism.
Not only is the study itself very interesting, but it does a great job going over the evidence landscape on UPFs and food at the current point in time.
Dr Dicken is very clear that at the moment, in his view, they have insufficient evidence to make policy decisions like this, a view that has been echoed by pretty much all academic institutions when they’ve helped inform recent dietary guidelines.
Making big sweeping moves based on flimsy evidence is a good way to make people wary of following dietary guidance at all. After all, what’s the point of listening to “the science” if they turn around in 5 years and say “whoops, turns out we were wrong”?
Be aware that the science on this is evolving pretty quickly.
A study came out recently that showed when folks ate a designed diet, one with and one without UPFs, they found the UPF diets resulted in a few additional lbs of weight gain.
The study accounted for a ton of variables. It showed that UPF calories lead to weight gain when consuming the same number of unprocessed calories.
I think, at the current moment, there is enough evidence to support guidelines to avoid UPFs for the most part. Idk about banning but I do think it'll eventually get there, at least in schools. But who knows? American lunches are garbage in the first place
> and yet when Americans set foot on European soil the first thought they have is 'everyone is so thin'.
I’m not sure how this interacts with the point I’m making.
> if there's any misstep here, it's not focused enough on sugar (which is a hard drug for kids) .
Sure, free sugars are associated with risk (which is reflected in dietary guidelines). Plenty of UPFs are not (which is why they generally aren’t flagged as a concern in dietary guidelines).
What's ultra-processed vs processed? If I make my own sausage by grinding the meat by hand, mixing it with salt and spices, then filling natural casings, I would consider that processed food. What makes it ultra-processed? When Hormel does it instead?
This was my gut response too, I reluctantly read "Ultra-Processed People" after it was mentioned by so many people, expecting to find it annoying for this exact reason.
I was actually massively surprised by how helpful a label ultra-processed can be, even if there are edge cases.
Hormel are probably adding a huge number of lab-based emulsifiers, flavour enhancers and colouring, that you definitely won't have at home. It's a pretty open and shut case about whether or not its ultra-processed.
There's of course edge cases were something we think of as healthy might be ultra-processed, and something obviously unhealthy might not be considered ultra-processed. But it's a really helpful category for identifying a whole bunch of foods that are linked with a range of negative health conditions.
There's an issue here with classification and harm. You can only say that UFPs are harmful if the definition used when measuring harm matches the definition used elsewhere. It seems all to easy to attach the harm to the label then switch out the contents while keeping the label.
Even then a group classification is useless if it includes a single element with a undue influence.
Consider an arbitrary SuperGiant classification that says that SuperGiant foods are harmful. SuperGiant foods are defined as any food you can buy in a supermarket plus also Polonium. You can easily produce a wide range of statistics to show harms caused by things classed as SuperGiant foods.
The specific exclusion is: Minimally processed prepared food as defined in paragraph (4) of subdivision (a) of Section 49015 of the Food and Agricultural Code, which may include foods in a variety of forms, including, but not limited to, whole, cut, sliced, diced, canned, pureed, dried, and pasteurized.
and that bit of Section 49015 says:
(4) “Minimally processed prepared food” may include any food prepared using either of the following processes:
(A) Traditional processes used to make food edible or to preserve it or to make it safe for human consumption, for example, smoking, roasting, freezing, drying, and fermenting.
(B) Physical processes that do not fundamentally alter the raw product or that only separate a whole, intact food into component parts, for example, grinding meat, separating eggs into albumen and yolk, and pressing fruits to produce juices.
What you described would be processed. Ultra processed foods are very difficult to make outside of an industrial setting. Pringles and dinosaur chicken nuggets are a perfect example. They make an almost recognizable paste and shape it.
How do we define what food is ultra processed though? Do we need "cake (commercial)" and "cake (home baked)" as I can bake a cake with all the standard stuff I have at home, but commercial cakes are usually chock full of E numbers. Another example would be like a jar of pasta sauce and a pasta sauce I've made, I don't think it's arguable that a pasta sauce I've made is ultra processed.
Like that definition doesn't seem to work when there's foods where the commercial variant is made differently to the normal version.
A homemade cake is minimally processed. The flour and sugar are processed but nothing that heavily alters it.
A commercial cake on the other hand has stabilizers, ph balancers, etc.
You're over thinking it. Almost nothing made at home is ultra processed unless you're doing some weird sausage making. If you can name the ingredients easily, it probably isn't ultra processed.
Are you straw-manning or genuinely want to know the difference between your home made 4 ingredient sausage vs. 15-20 ingredient sausage by Hormel, including additives, emulsifiers, flavor enhancers, colorings, and other ingredients not typically used or readily available for home cooking?
Are all of these ingredients equally harmful? If not, why not just ban or restrict the ones that are harmful and keep using the rest of them? It's sort of weird to bundle a lot of very different types of chemicals under the same term.
These novel ingredients keep getting banned for negative health issues like causing cancer, new variants keep getting introduced to the public, the new variants keep getting banned doe being harmful, repeat ad infinitum.
The public are not lab rats to be experimented on using these artificial ingredients so that companies can make money.
So things with scientific names are "ultra processed", and things with common names are not? That's just childish fear mongering.
Everything is a chemical. Salt is sodium chloride. Ingredients should be assessed individually and scientifically for their safety. Not just scary name equals unsafe. That's childish.
The war on monosodium glutamate is based racism and not science. It's as safe as table salt. There is no real science showing that it's anything but delicious.
Dextrose is just a simple sugar. It's essentially glucose chemically. Nothing to worry about. Your body produces glucose itself. You are not ultra processed because of that fact.
High fructose corn syrup is just fructose, another simple sugar [1], and there's no real science to back up all the fear mongering around it. It's no worse for you than any other sugar. All things in moderation.
Their idea is to point out curing agents, flavor enhancers and similar stuff you would not need if using fresh food made from high quality ingredients - basically if you see food with these ingredients, chances are high that corners were cut along the path for whatever reason.
And colorants/"food dyes" are even worse. A bunch of them are under strong suspicion of being carcinogenic, and often are used to mask the ingredients being cured for longer shelf lives or being of sub-par quality.
sure, it's all nature. and then wonder why you get 50% of the population morbidly obese...
you are being skeptical in a very silly way, sorry to say. if you don't see the industry incentives to use trash in your food instead of normal ingredients, you are missing the point in a very unproductive way.
The population is obese because they eat too many calories and they will not stop. Arbitrarily banning foods because they are not "normal" doesn't prevent this. Butter is OK, cream is OK, sugar is OK. When sugar takes a slightly different form it's "not normal" so banning it will make everyone thin again.
Is it any more evidence for ultra processing being the problem than the last N food panics? Obesity was high when the story was "high fat foods are the problem" too.
1. sodium nitrite/nitrate salts have been used in Europe at the very least from the 19th century to cure meat, the earliest regulations in (of course) Germany date back to 1916 [1].
2. MSG has been a part of traditional Japanese dishes, it naturally occurs in soy and fermented fish sauce.
So for these two substances, I'd say their presence in food doesn't make it "ultra processed" all on its own - they and their usage in cuisine date back to times when there was no food industry to speak of.
A lot of these limits seem to be set so high that they won't have much impact. But at the same time, the calories limit per item and saturated fat limit are low enough that you potentially cant serve a baked chicken thigh.
It’s not an America only problem, we are similarly affected. So is every other country on earth.
In Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Malta, Ireland obesity ranges from 38%–31% and it’s rising. On an individual level the solution is food and exercise. On a societal level there is no know solution and it’s rapidly getting worse.
But the reasons can be very different. East Europe had severe food shortages until the fall of communism. The result? People eating too much after the fall of communism, which become a cultural thing ("you don't have huge meals => you are poor / is like during communism"). Add to that car ownership ("public transport => only poor use it") and you get what happened probably in USA due more to lobbying and industry.
One good thing in my opinion is that is much easier in EU to at least choose. I was amazed in USA how badly marked are the components (in EU you have at least on each thing sugar/100g, fat, salt, etc.) and how unavailable are fresher things (even if they would be expensive). So while in EU I would say "repeat more to people to eat varied and not abuse salt/fat/sugar", that would not work as well in the USA (or, you need to teach them math and unit conversion as well :-p)
Diet is part of the problem but a big part of the issue is the inherent sedentary lifestyle associated with American infrastructure and suburban development. If you design tons of housing in a way that encourages people to utilize cars as much as possible, invest as little as possible into infrastructure like public sidewalks and bike lanes, etc then don’t be shocked when your populace becomes fat and lazy, especially when you combine this with a carbohydrate/sugar rich diet. The EU has a worsening diet. Japan eats more carbs than America. What’s the difference? They naturally walk much more as part of their daily routine because their governments invest in communities rather than stealing tax money to launder to military contractors.
Whenever I travel outside the USA I am always astounded at how little effort I need to put into getting my daily steps vs when I am at home. At home it is a concentrated effort
most of the sedentary lifestyle of the US is intentionally done, as a silently understood truth, to avoid violent crime without getting caught by title vii lawsuits
the only places that dont need to build suburbs with 10 mile buffer zones from other people are cities like SF and NY that exclude people via rent prices or other place like alaska, obvious reasons
i have had (white) frends visit LA/hollywood and get arrested for walking on sidewalk, taken to local police station and told yes this is for your own safety, you are free to go but do not walk around here
It is the case that we've structured things like suburbs around avoiding something that frightens much of American society, but it isn't violent crime.
Big difference in carbs like sugar and say bread, though. Certainly not an expert on Japanese diet, but I don't think they consume a lot of sugar. Their deserts are famously rather savoury.
(And by bread I mean non-American bread that does not contain sugar, or relatively little (mostly low-end commercial stuff for shelf-life).)
This brings back fond memories of growing up in the 80s eating school cafeteria concoctions like “flying saucers” which were a slice of bologna topped with a perfectly round scoop of instant mashed potatoes, into which was stuck a bright yellow-orange stick of ‘cheese’.
If you've never worked in food before, you may be unaware that borderline half of the foods you eat, in restaurants, hospitals, prisons, even schools, are just the same frozen foods from Sysco. Their products are sold nationally and are lower quality than the frozen foods you get at the grocery stores, sold at ridiculous markups at restaurants. Sysco UPFs are at best "mid" and usually worse. They also involve a lot of worker exploitation in Mexico and the far-east.
A popular meme variation in the chef community is as follows:
I can imagine that some „food“ corps going berserk now. And setting up campaigns worth millions against these moves.
I have drastically reduced the amount of ultra processed food in my diet, now eating clean food only, and I cannot describe in words how my energy level climbed to levels I have never seen in the past years. My blood glucose is stable, my mood as well, and I have no cravings. Also my body weight dropped significantly. Although I eat full plates with vegetables, fish, poultry.
Yes, because (ultra) processed food tends to be much more cheaper than un- or minimally altered food.
Think of ordinary tomatoes for example. In its raw form a tomato goes bad after a few weeks (depending on how it's stored), as a store you got to discard a bunch of them before that time because the tomato develops blemishes from handling/storage, and the tomatoes have to be handled more sensitively and with more effort.
Now, take that tomato and can it straight after harvest, together with a bunch of preservatives. It now has a far longer expiration time in the order of years, it doesn't need cooling, and tomatoes that come from the field with blemishes can now be used as well, just cut them up, remove the unsightly pieces and sell it as cut-up canned tomatoes.
From here on, the calculation is the same for both kitchens and low income populations... both need tomatoes to cook a meal. So what do they prefer? Fresh tomatoes where one now also needs to take care of leftover tomatoes and do another meal before they expire, or canned tomatoes that are cheaper to source and easier to match with actual demand?
Jarred/canned tomatoes might be the worst example. You barely need to try to make the preservation mechanism work. The pH of tomatoes tends to be very low and it's very easy to pull it down with lime juice, etc.
The highest quality marinara almost universally starts with something like an ordinary can of San Marzano tomatoes. This isn't some exotic find at Whole Foods. This will be collecting dust on the shelves at Kroger and Brookshires.
Buying fresh produce 100% of the time is theatrics. There are a lot of things it's a good idea for, but you are genuinely wasting your time in other areas.
> Now, take that tomato and can it straight after harvest, together with a bunch of preservatives.
What preservatives are we talking about, citric acid? I checked the ingredient lists of Mutti and Heinz canned tomatoes (EU resident). Mutti contains exactly 2 ingredients: whole tomatoes and tomato juice, Heinz 3: whole tomatoes, tomato juice and citric acid.
Seems to be because the definition is arbitrarily shaped to fit the agendas of whoever is writing the definition. UPFs seem like the screen time of the 2020s -- an overly vague and mostly useless definition borne out of hysteria around a real issue in how people eat.
Arbitrarily defining foods that have artificial sweeteners as suddenly being ultra-processed is not coherent.
Edit: Found it. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml... (thanks to @crummy for the correction). Seems like a reasonable start. Amusing to see that alcoholic drinks are specifically not considered ultra-processed foods for the purposes of school meals!
> In July 2025, the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that 32.7 percent of children and youth between 12 and 19 years old are prediabetic.
Wow.
> Wow.
Sadly, I'm not too surprised. My state also has free breakfast and lunch in public schools and it is possible for them to get served over 100g of added sugar between the two meals and classroom provided snacks. Then add to it whatever the kids are eating at home.
It also creates added difficulty for kids to concentrate on lessons when their blood sugar is spiking and crashing repeatedly throughout the day.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
> (3) (A) High amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as defined respectively as follows:
> (i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat
I feel like the saturated fat limit would be the most impactful restrictions.
However right after it's entirely opened up again:
> (b) “Ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” does not include any of the following:
> (1) Commodity food specifically made available by the United States Department of Agriculture.
> (2) A raw agricultural commodity as defined in Section 110020.
> (3) An unprocessed locally grown or locally raised agricultural product as defined in paragraph
Excess sugar and simple starches tend to get absorbed more completely than excess fat, I'm not sure added fat is the biggest issue.
wonder who'll be the first to argue that HFCS isn't sugar.
That aside, I think the law is a great step in the right direction for the US.
Hopefully it can be expanded across the US.
“ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” means (any food or beverage that contains a substance described in paragraph (2) and either high amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as described in subparagraph (A) of paragraph (3), or a nonnutritive sweetener or other substance described in subparagraph (B) of paragraph (3)).
or
“ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” means (any food or beverage that contains a substance described in paragraph (2) and either high amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as described in subparagraph (A) of paragraph (3)), or a nonnutritive sweetener or other substance described in subparagraph (B) of paragraph (3).
or
“ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” means (any food or beverage that contains a substance described in paragraph (2)) and either high amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as described in subparagraph (A) of paragraph (3), or a nonnutritive sweetener or other substance described in subparagraph (B) of paragraph (3).
Also as quoted elsewhere: Deep frying is ultra-processing?
If the thing that is bad for us is the processing and preservatives then we can pursue that... but if you want to count things like potato chips then we need to be honest about what the label actually means. The UPF label adds a veneer of scientific precision that isn't actually present in any guidelines surrounding it.
"NoScript detected a potential Cross-Site Scripting attack
from [...] to http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov."
:|
These are unprocessed foods [1].
From them you get processed culinary ingredients, like olive oil, vinegar, honey and butter. As long as you’re minimally vigilant with these, you should be fine, though some production methods may still add preservatives or use solvents in their manufacture.
After that one has processed foods, which may still have a good amount of Group 1 and 2 ingredients, before we get to Group 4, UPFs, what California is banning in school lunches.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
For me, processed food might include something like unsweetened peanut butter where while the only ingredient is peanuts, it's still been through a process of grinding so that it's no longer in its natural form.
At the other end of the spectrum an example of ultra processed food would be a factory packaged item with a long list of ingredients which includes ones you don't recognise e.g. chemical names or E numbers.
- Unprocessed or minimally processed foods (fresh or frozen products, yoghurts, etc)
- Processed culinary ingredients (oil, vinegar)
- Processed foods (foods created from combining elements of the first 2 groups using typical cooking processes, like bread, pasta, some meats, canned vegetables)
- Ultra-processed foods (foods requiring industrial processing).
“Traditional methods to puff or pop rice include frying in oil or salt. Commercial puffed rice is usually made by heating rice kernels under high pressure in the presence of steam, though the method of manufacture varies widely” [1].
If I had to guess, the commercial stuff is more thoroughly and homogeneously gelatinized. That, in turn, probably raises its glycemic index.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffed_rice
No. Processed culinary ingredient (Group 2) and minimally processed (Group 1). (Obviously, both can be turned into a UPF through fuckery.)
Flour is minimally processed, Nova Group 1, if it’s simply milled and separated. If it’s prepared with industrial solvents, or bleached, it goes straight to Group 4.
Nova doesn’t distinguish between ingredients and food [1]. (It needs to be able to do this. UPFs are defined, in part, by almost lacking low-Nova inputs.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
Bread is made from dough, which is mainly made from flour (the "minimally processed" food), which is made from grains (the unprocessed food)
Depends on if they’re ultra processed or not.
If they won’t stale for weeks, they’re ultra processed with preservatives and/or solvents. If they go stale and have a simple ingredients list, they probably aren’t.
(And kids don’t need to be habituated to having either with every lunch.)
So no, it’s a lot more arbitrary than that.
When a grandma bakes some cookies for their grandchildren she uses only some basic ingredients - eggs, flour, butter, sugar.
For the product that food industries calls as cookies however, the list of ingredients looks like a git SHA.
This whole terminology just brings about brain damaged discourse as seen in this same thread. Just you wait for someone to say "itS jUsT LiKE caLLiNg wAtER dIHydrOgEN mONoXide".
I much prefer the following:
1. Food providers basically do all this crap to reduce costs. That's it that's the incentive. For _various_ reasons, a good, local food supply chain has become expensive. If we go debugging the causes of that we will find that the solution is outside the purview of a nutrition department. Let's not do that.
2. Instead, we try to limit menus that tend towards being cheap (like school food in this context) to contain dishes that are cheap by default. Food that's cheap by default, pre-cost-optimisation, is most often simple food. Small number of ingredients, very simple cooking process, minimal frying, etc,. Simple enough that they can just make it right there from start to finish, or somewhere nearby, for low cost, with minimal supply volatility.
Using my hollywood-inspired knowledge of the american school menu, but practical experience with handling food at schools in India, I'd suggest s/cereal/oats+fruits, s/mac-n-cheese/simpler pasta dish-say pesto or shredded chicken pasta, s/choco milk/just milk, s/chicken nuggets/pulled chicken sandwich with simple veggies. Can add some stew/soup in there as well. Beans too if needed. All with simple spice combinations.
These can be easily made fresh on-site or at a satellite kitchen serving 10-15 schools. Beyond 30-40 is when even this gets dicey.
Eggs I suppose schools won't be (probably aren't right now) allowed to break it and cook it on-site due to salmonella risk, which is why they all use pasteurised pre-made crap. So I've omitted it. It's also weird for lunch, I assume. I've left out cheese too due to the tendency for folks to shift to imitation cheese, as it's most common cheese even in usual grocery shops. Oil is also minimal - you basically are only using a drizzle of it for trapping flavour above. No frying is done. Bread is pretty much the only processed product left there, you can probably mandate whole wheat % for those, but still, overall it will be a big improvement.
Instead of playing a cat and mouse game where you make regulations, and you get back the same effect just through a route skirting those regulations, a practical solution similar to the one above, which removes the incentives to skirt, might be in order.
That said, I don't think school food has much to do with child obesity crises. What they eat outside school far outweighs school food in quantity. It's an easy political win though since it's the only part of kids diet that govt controls, which is why they harp on about it.
...
> “Stabilizers and thickeners: Substances used to produce viscous solutions or dispersions, to impart body, improve consistency, or stabilize emulsions, including suspending and bodying agents, setting agents, jellying agents, and bulking agents, etc.”
So ... flour? Actually healthier things with scarier names like xanthan gum?
Common culprits include chemicals added during the bleaching process and addition of "enzyme" / other ingredients that help improve baking consistency. Some examples:
https://www.hfpappexternal.fda.gov/scripts/fdcc/index.cfm?se...
https://www.hfpappexternal.fda.gov/scripts/fdcc/index.cfm?se...
https://www.hfpappexternal.fda.gov/scripts/fdcc/index.cfm?se...
If used as a thickener, perhaps.
> Actually healthier things with scarier names like xanthan gum?
This would almost certainly fall afoul of these rules. And with good reason. Xantham gum is fine per se, but it tends to help unhealthy food stay together. I don’t see why a school kitchen needs to serve anything thickened with it.
I think one could make xantham gum as a processed culinary ingredient (Nova group 2) ingredient, so long as it isn’t packaged with preservatives.
The bill itself calls out using USDA databases for various ingredients and various sections of federal regulations, so I can't comment too much about how they'd feel about xanthum gum without diving deep. Not to go off on a tangent, but just from the bill's text, I can say for sure they don't like nonnutritive sweeteners, which I think really hurts diabetics choices at reducing their reliance on insulin while still enjoying nice treats. Although not too important for a school meal, it's definitely part of the ultra processed conversation and why it's not a simple thing to categorize food into groups.
For reference: xanthan gum specifically would fall afoul of the rules, as... a (ii) stabilizer or thickener, (iv) coloring or coloring adjunct, and (v) emulsifier.
https://www.hfpappexternal.fda.gov/scripts/fdcc/index.cfm?se...
It's quite silly that it's classified as a coloring agent and an emulsifier, when it's neither of those things.
I would gander you have little to no experience in the kitchen. Literally ANY sauce? Basically any Asian cuisine. Soup? Do you eat soup?
Keep ganderin’.
> Literally ANY sauce? Basically any Asian cuisine. Soup?
None of these need to be thickened with xantham gum…
> Commodity food specifically made available by the United States Department of Agriculture.
Which I'd guess includes flour.
[1] https://www.fns.usda.gov/csfp/commodity-supplemental-food-pr...
Does this count if they supply it from a vending machine on their premises :-)
I'm sure they extensively deliberated the health effect of Luo Han Fruit Concentrate and Maltitol
There is plenty of data showing diet has a big impact on health and other outcomes, yet far less data on specifics.
Since science doesn't give specific things to ban, legislation is pretty much headed towards "let's have everyone eat what they eat in the south of France where people are really healthy".
Exactly. Science can’t give us actionable information, so appeal to established practice it is.
The problem isn't the MSG. It's providing a well balanced diet. We have a relatively clear idea of what constitutes "well balanced". You can quibble about the specifics but this bill is fundamentally off on a crazy unscientific tangents.
There are just three lines that actually address nutrition:
(i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat.
(ii) The food or beverage contains a ratio of milligrams of sodium to calories that is equal to or greater than 1:1.
(iii) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from added sugars.
Instead of paragraphs of banning the "scary chemicals", why not work on making sure kids get the vitamins, vegetables and fiber they need in each meal. I'm not a nutritionist, but there are some basics that are braindead simple that don't involve banning Sucralose.
- every meal is served with white rice ("empty calories")
- every meal is served with Kimchi (high sodium)
- most dishes are flavored with soy sauce, gochutan, rice syrup... they are extremely high in sodium + msg
- people love fried chicken with syrupy sauces
- korean barbeque is popular, with very fatty cuts (pork belly etc.)
Pretty much all of those foods would be considered unhealthy, but somehow Koreans don't seem to suffer from obesity like US + Europe do, I have no idea why.
I think most people who are thin just have a food intake regulation that is pretty well balanced so they don't over eat because they don't feel that hungry when they have had enough calories.
The reason why some groups of people have been increasingly prone to obesity is external factors interfering with that regulation. It's probably lots of things, food availability, ingredients, cost, culture, other mental health issues, medications, entertainment, work, availability of cars. One thing it is not is simple.
The calories in vs calories out mechanic is simple, the reasons why that's going out of kilter is not.
Second, I do not know whether there are some Korean diets that are more correlated with obesity. In Thailand, people eat much the same, and they are more often obese on the global scale. Less kimchi, though, and probably more coconut milk and sugar.
Simple diet composition is probably not the main factor in obesity. I do notice that "normal" portion sizes are pretty small in Korea, based on what I see in their media. Even feasts are shown to have reasonable portion sizes. In the US, portion sizes tend to maximally fill the stomach, and have grown considerably over the years.
Highly processed foods are generally designed to add addictive properties and cause overconsumption. I am not sure that's the goal of the Korean dishes you have tried. If we understand what the new weight loss drugs are telling us, we can see that increasing satiety faster with fewer calories should be the goal of our foods. (no citation, just my interpretation of what's going on).
1. https://general.kosso.or.kr/html/user/core/view/reaction/mai... 2. https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9059/13/2/373
Not sure if there is any truth in that.
Every meal must contain more empty calories than everything else combined, but not in an excessive amount.
I do not know about Korea, but I have been in Japan, where also every meal is served with excellent white rice. However, there was never too much of it and in general the quantities of all ingredients were right for a balanced diet, much more so than I have seen in most other countries.
Interestingly, dairy products like butter are explicitly allowed, despite the fact that 50%+ of its fats are saturated
> I'm not a nutritionist, but there are some basics that are braindead simple that don't involve banning Sucralose.
I'm in favor of banning artificial sweeteners. Just look at why they are used in animal farming to see why it is a bad idea to randomly add them to human food.
If someone is habitually consuming sugar sweetened beverages, replacing those with ASBs will, the evidence strongly suggests, reduce your risk of obesity and various chronic diseases.
We can say "just don't consume either" but we have decades of attempting such policies that shows people don't work that way. Someone who wants to drink a can of coke will drink a can of coke, why would we ban the healthier option?
https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478
It was suggested elsewhere that the primary mechanism for soft drink associated mortality is acidic fluids causing tooth decay, which in turn causes cardiovascular disease. (Bacteria entering the bloodstream through inflamed oral mucosa, and forming plaques along arterial walls.)
And the evidence for artificial sweetener benefits on population level is practically non-existent. In fact animal farming points to a detrimental effect.
When we do that we pretty consistently see benefits. Good overview as a response to the WHO position paper here that goes over that evidence base: https://mailchi.mp/b30c80ddf8ba/who-as
But all empirical observations so far show that artificial sweeteners in people's diets do not have the desired effect when people's food and beverage intake is uncontrolled.
In fact results from animal studies are that you can even substitute part of the feed with just the artificial sweetener to achieve the same body mass gain. And this is known since 1960s with Cyclamate and rats: https://doi.org/10.1038/221091b0
More studies in the meantime varied a bit on the size of the effect, and some were inconclusive, but generally the results held up.
So no, artificial sweeteners do not help to manage weight. What the studies actually show is that controlling people's intake does.
Example: Abstinence is 100% effective against STDs and teenage pregnancy in any controlled setting. That does not make it a good public health policy to tell teenagers to abstain from having sex. In fact despite condoms having lower efficacy than abstinence, teaching people the proper use of condoms is overall more effective.
If we want to solve obesity then randomly adding/substituting artificial sweeteners to human food will not work. Instead we need to reduce access to hyperpalatable foods, which can be done through economic means (e.g. taxes).
Not unsurprisingly, most of those changes use fancy processes and ingredients to mimick other ingredients and processes.
Legislation like this is saying "enough, you can only use the following set of processes". If that results in some hypothetical healthy food being banned, so be it, but really this is about a loss of trust.
What’s “processing”?
> The food industry has demonstrated that it doesn't give a crap about producing healthy food if that impacts the bottom line, so they pull every trick they can to increase profits whilst hiding the changes from consumers' ability to detect them
Ok? What’s that got to do with which forms of processing are unhealthy? This whole statement doesn’t really add anything.
> Not unsurprisingly, most of those changes use fancy processes and ingredients to mimick other ingredients and processes.
So it’s the “fancy” part you don’t like? What does fancy mean? You can quantify it, I’m sure?
> Legislation like this is saying "enough, you can only use the following set of processes".
Right, and as GP pointed out, the following set doesn’t seem to be particularly healthy.
The point of anti UPF sentiment isn't to be healthy per se, but to remove the disconnect between food as most people understand it and we evolved to handle and what is typically produced in industrial kitchens.
The idea that we can process our way to a healthy diet has not stood up to the real world experimentation. Maybe it's time to stop experimenting on school children and just accept that perhaps they should be fed food that is generally recognised as such down to its base ingredients.
Wholemeal bread with soya lecithins? Evil UPF, ban it.
Artisinally produced sourdough using refined flour with tons of salt but no lecithins? Delightful, fill your boots.
We've let nutrition policy become controlled by fad diet book authors and the results aren't pretty...
Outside of causing an imbalance (which would require a LOT of salt), there’s nothing bad about a lot of salt. People have been eating tons of salt for centuries.
> refined flower
Not sure what definition you’re using here so this might not be ideal, but probably fine. People have been milling for centuries.
> soya lecithins
Made in a lab about 100 years ago, and its primary use is to increase profits via long shelf life (increasing shelf life could be a noble goal, ie freezers are great). We have billionaires flying private jets around. Redo some resource allocation and we don’t need soya lecithins.
Much modernity has 0 respect for Chestetons fence. On top of that, nutrition science is basically a social science in terms of accuracy (not a dig, it’s very hard). Many “advances” today are purely profit motivated and don’t pay enough respect to the people’s wellbeing. We should be skeptical of changes done to make the rich richer.
What’s your goalpost for evidence here, I.e. what would it take to convince you that salt consumption above the levels indicated in dietary guidelines is harmful?
Depends on
a) How well it's believed science is able to keep up with the "creativity" and dollars of the food industry.
b) The health costs to the individual and society of any subsequent problem.
c) How well the society in question is likely to do in overcoming the vested interests to fix any subsequent problem.
They fuck up your microbiome and the insulin response. There is absolutely no reason to use them ever. Grow up and embrace the bitterness.
Someone who wants to drink a can of coke will drink a can of coke, why would we ban the healthier option?
That’s not really the case when discussing school meals though, when kids will generally be eating what is put in front of them.
Subjectively, a few months of wearing a monitor appeared to show no perceptible effect on my own.
Worse is that artificial sweeteners increase feed conversion efficiency (an effect which has been known since 1960s experiments with rats and Cyclamate), and are for this reason frequently added to animal feed.
For humans however this effect is undesirable, as it exacerbates the problem which they are supposed to solve.
What impact would pouring a bunch of refined sugar on animal feed have on feed conversion efficiency?
What do studies on humans say on the actual real-life effects of people using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar?
If you permit me to be a bit glib, if we outlawed everything that people think tastes good, almost no one would overeat, and we would have solved obesity. Without going to that extreme, surely there are other interventions that can help limit the problem of overeating, and isn’t there evidence that artificial sweeteners are actually helpful in doing that? Remember that the starting point for humans isn’t hay and the slop we feed to pigs, it’s ice cream and McDonald’s.
No, not at all.
Feed conversion efficiency is the body weight gained per unit of feed consumed. If you add artificial sweeteners to animal feed, they will gain more weight when consuming the same feed, or gain the same weight when consuming less feed. This leads to cost savings for the farmer.
This observation may be a bit surprising as artificial sweeteners have 0 calories. But then again, antibiotics and growth hormones have the same effect.
> What do studies on humans say on the actual real-life effects of people using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar?
When it comes to soft drinks and all-cause mortality, artificially sweetened is not better nor worse than sugar. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478
When it comes to weight, results are either neutral or inconclusive.
The countries that consume the most processed foods are also the longest lived, obviously such a correlation does not imply processed foods lead to longevity, just that any accusation of cause and effect is more easily explained by abundance and affluenza (sic).
How long before the UPF cult proclaims vaccines are poison, I note than some of their number already do.
There is a connection between ultra processing and hyper-palatability, but it is a very lossy one. Doritos are ultra processed but no honest definition of ultra processed foods can include Fritos. Are Doritos substantially worse for you than Fritos?
Is ice cream ultra processed? There are definitely ultra processed ice creams you can buy, with lots of stabilizers or whatever. But you can also make ice cream with just cream, milk, sugar, and vanilla beans. If anything, the homemade stuff that isn't ultra processed is even more hyper-palatable than the "frozen dairy dessert" kind.
YMMV.
What? Are you talking about trans fats?
Since mid-1990s, margarine no longer contains appreciable amounts of trans fats.
Butter also contains trans fats but these are ruminant TFAs which I understand are not so bad.
This is why despite butter composition being worse "on paper" there is no empirical observation that it is less healthy than plant margarine.
"Brazil limits ultra-processed foods in school meals to 15%"
https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en/politica/noticia/2025-02...
This responsibility is roughly identical to the responsibility that cafeteria staff have. Feeding meals to hundreds of kids is not any different from feeding meals to hundreds of adults. Yet cafeteria staff are, like you say, treated as garbage and uncreative jobs. So of course nobody who is passionate about food production decides to work in a school cafeteria.
Money solves this (plus society giving a shit about the flourishing of children). That's the long and short of the story. Decide that school lunch is not just about meeting minimum nutritional standards and make it about the joy of serving and eating food. Vastly increase pay for cafeteria staff, increase their autonomy to produce meals, and increase their budget for ingredients.
Everything else is putting lipstick on a pig. Further constraints on acceptable ingredients or macro and micro nutritional breakdowns will just force the cost optimization to some other unwanted state.
Cooks have absolutely no say in what they cook or really how they cook it.
It's Sysco food.
Your actual gripe is with local governments, the USDA and voters who consider funding any social program to be communism.
Not only is the study itself very interesting, but it does a great job going over the evidence landscape on UPFs and food at the current point in time.
Dr Dicken is very clear that at the moment, in his view, they have insufficient evidence to make policy decisions like this, a view that has been echoed by pretty much all academic institutions when they’ve helped inform recent dietary guidelines.
Making big sweeping moves based on flimsy evidence is a good way to make people wary of following dietary guidance at all. After all, what’s the point of listening to “the science” if they turn around in 5 years and say “whoops, turns out we were wrong”?
This is a misstep IMO.
A study came out recently that showed when folks ate a designed diet, one with and one without UPFs, they found the UPF diets resulted in a few additional lbs of weight gain.
The study accounted for a ton of variables. It showed that UPF calories lead to weight gain when consuming the same number of unprocessed calories.
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(25)...
I think, at the current moment, there is enough evidence to support guidelines to avoid UPFs for the most part. Idk about banning but I do think it'll eventually get there, at least in schools. But who knows? American lunches are garbage in the first place
if there's any misstep here, it's not focused enough on sugar (which is a hard drug for kids) .
I’m not sure how this interacts with the point I’m making.
> if there's any misstep here, it's not focused enough on sugar (which is a hard drug for kids) .
Sure, free sugars are associated with risk (which is reflected in dietary guidelines). Plenty of UPFs are not (which is why they generally aren’t flagged as a concern in dietary guidelines).
I was actually massively surprised by how helpful a label ultra-processed can be, even if there are edge cases.
Hormel are probably adding a huge number of lab-based emulsifiers, flavour enhancers and colouring, that you definitely won't have at home. It's a pretty open and shut case about whether or not its ultra-processed.
There's of course edge cases were something we think of as healthy might be ultra-processed, and something obviously unhealthy might not be considered ultra-processed. But it's a really helpful category for identifying a whole bunch of foods that are linked with a range of negative health conditions.
Even then a group classification is useless if it includes a single element with a undue influence.
Consider an arbitrary SuperGiant classification that says that SuperGiant foods are harmful. SuperGiant foods are defined as any food you can buy in a supermarket plus also Polonium. You can easily produce a wide range of statistics to show harms caused by things classed as SuperGiant foods.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1039004911
and that bit of Section 49015 says:
(4) “Minimally processed prepared food” may include any food prepared using either of the following processes:
(A) Traditional processes used to make food edible or to preserve it or to make it safe for human consumption, for example, smoking, roasting, freezing, drying, and fermenting.
(B) Physical processes that do not fundamentally alter the raw product or that only separate a whole, intact food into component parts, for example, grinding meat, separating eggs into albumen and yolk, and pressing fruits to produce juices.
UPFs usually have ingredients you've never seen for sale.
Like that definition doesn't seem to work when there's foods where the commercial variant is made differently to the normal version.
A homemade cake is minimally processed. The flour and sugar are processed but nothing that heavily alters it.
A commercial cake on the other hand has stabilizers, ph balancers, etc.
You're over thinking it. Almost nothing made at home is ultra processed unless you're doing some weird sausage making. If you can name the ingredients easily, it probably isn't ultra processed.
This would be a Nova Group 3 food.
Processed. But not ultra-processed.
If you buy a fresh hamburger at the butcher, made by him with salt and pepper, it's processed food.
But if you add sodium nitrite/nitrate, monosodium glutamate, phosphates, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors, sodium erythorbate, carrageenan, bha/bht, propyl gallate, tbhq, soy protein isolate, modified food starch, dextrose, caramel color, red 40, yellow 5, etc... it's ultra-processed food.
The public are not lab rats to be experimented on using these artificial ingredients so that companies can make money.
Everything is a chemical. Salt is sodium chloride. Ingredients should be assessed individually and scientifically for their safety. Not just scary name equals unsafe. That's childish.
The war on monosodium glutamate is based racism and not science. It's as safe as table salt. There is no real science showing that it's anything but delicious.
Dextrose is just a simple sugar. It's essentially glucose chemically. Nothing to worry about. Your body produces glucose itself. You are not ultra processed because of that fact.
High fructose corn syrup is just fructose, another simple sugar [1], and there's no real science to back up all the fear mongering around it. It's no worse for you than any other sugar. All things in moderation.
1. https://skeptoid.com/episodes/157
The name comes from the additional step of converting some portion of the glucose to fructose after converting starch to glucose.
Depending on production method, I believe MSG can be a Nova Group 2 (processed culinary ingredient) product.
And colorants/"food dyes" are even worse. A bunch of them are under strong suspicion of being carcinogenic, and often are used to mask the ingredients being cured for longer shelf lives or being of sub-par quality.
you are being skeptical in a very silly way, sorry to say. if you don't see the industry incentives to use trash in your food instead of normal ingredients, you are missing the point in a very unproductive way.
Two people can eat the same number of calories, but if one of them is slamming UPFs they will gain more weight.
Additionally, UPFs do not satiate hunger like more natural foods. Meaning people can eat more UPFs than more natural foods before feeling full.
There are absolutely industrial ingredients we should be banning in the US that other countries have rightfully banned.
Come to me with scientific evidence and not fear mongering, and then we can talk on an equal field.
1. sodium nitrite/nitrate salts have been used in Europe at the very least from the 19th century to cure meat, the earliest regulations in (of course) Germany date back to 1916 [1].
2. MSG has been a part of traditional Japanese dishes, it naturally occurs in soy and fermented fish sauce.
So for these two substances, I'd say their presence in food doesn't make it "ultra processed" all on its own - they and their usage in cuisine date back to times when there was no food industry to speak of.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%B6keln
Sport won't fix that, food will.
In Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Malta, Ireland obesity ranges from 38%–31% and it’s rising. On an individual level the solution is food and exercise. On a societal level there is no know solution and it’s rapidly getting worse.
One good thing in my opinion is that is much easier in EU to at least choose. I was amazed in USA how badly marked are the components (in EU you have at least on each thing sugar/100g, fat, salt, etc.) and how unavailable are fresher things (even if they would be expensive). So while in EU I would say "repeat more to people to eat varied and not abuse salt/fat/sugar", that would not work as well in the USA (or, you need to teach them math and unit conversion as well :-p)
Whenever I travel outside the USA I am always astounded at how little effort I need to put into getting my daily steps vs when I am at home. At home it is a concentrated effort
the only places that dont need to build suburbs with 10 mile buffer zones from other people are cities like SF and NY that exclude people via rent prices or other place like alaska, obvious reasons
i have had (white) frends visit LA/hollywood and get arrested for walking on sidewalk, taken to local police station and told yes this is for your own safety, you are free to go but do not walk around here
(And by bread I mean non-American bread that does not contain sugar, or relatively little (mostly low-end commercial stuff for shelf-life).)
That tells a huge story.
EU obesity has increased by 138% across the broader WHO European Region since 1975, with rates rising 21% between 2006 and 2016 alone.
Yum!
A popular meme variation in the chef community is as follows:
"Wait, it's all just Sysco?" "Always has been"
I have drastically reduced the amount of ultra processed food in my diet, now eating clean food only, and I cannot describe in words how my energy level climbed to levels I have never seen in the past years. My blood glucose is stable, my mood as well, and I have no cravings. Also my body weight dropped significantly. Although I eat full plates with vegetables, fish, poultry.
Kids don’t pay for school lunch in California.
Not for a few years now [1].
[1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/nu/sn/cauniversalmeals.asp
Think of ordinary tomatoes for example. In its raw form a tomato goes bad after a few weeks (depending on how it's stored), as a store you got to discard a bunch of them before that time because the tomato develops blemishes from handling/storage, and the tomatoes have to be handled more sensitively and with more effort.
Now, take that tomato and can it straight after harvest, together with a bunch of preservatives. It now has a far longer expiration time in the order of years, it doesn't need cooling, and tomatoes that come from the field with blemishes can now be used as well, just cut them up, remove the unsightly pieces and sell it as cut-up canned tomatoes.
From here on, the calculation is the same for both kitchens and low income populations... both need tomatoes to cook a meal. So what do they prefer? Fresh tomatoes where one now also needs to take care of leftover tomatoes and do another meal before they expire, or canned tomatoes that are cheaper to source and easier to match with actual demand?
The highest quality marinara almost universally starts with something like an ordinary can of San Marzano tomatoes. This isn't some exotic find at Whole Foods. This will be collecting dust on the shelves at Kroger and Brookshires.
Buying fresh produce 100% of the time is theatrics. There are a lot of things it's a good idea for, but you are genuinely wasting your time in other areas.
What preservatives are we talking about, citric acid? I checked the ingredient lists of Mutti and Heinz canned tomatoes (EU resident). Mutti contains exactly 2 ingredients: whole tomatoes and tomato juice, Heinz 3: whole tomatoes, tomato juice and citric acid.
Spoiler: The science and definitions are... depressingly bad.
Arbitrarily defining foods that have artificial sweeteners as suddenly being ultra-processed is not coherent.